J K Rowling's ear

Karen Trollope Kumar told me about Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone which she'd heard about from her English relatives, before it was published on this side of the pond, so I bought and read it before the publishing juggernaut began to roll. It was great fun to read, laugh out loud funny in places, and, I thought, spot-on accurate in capturing the way English school children were talking in the 1980s and early 1990s. Rowling's ear for demotic speech is the most impressive feature of The Casual Vacancy, an excellent novel about small town politics infested with a large cast of unlikable characters. Most of the school children are especially unpleasant, but Rowling has captured the way they talk, including the way they use obscenities, with consummate skill. She's done it again in The Cuckoo's Calling, a pseudonymously written whodunnit with a tough guy private detective, Cormoran Strike, who lost a leg in Afghanistan and is saved from bankruptcy by a wealthy childhood acquaintance who pays him well to find evidence that a sister's recent suicide was murder. Like J K Rowling's other books, the strength of this one rests on the smart, pungent dialogue, liberally seasoned with the meaningless obscenities that punctuate almost every conversation in pubs and public transport in London. Perhaps Cormoran Strike will reappear in more books still incubating in J K Rowling's fertile brain. I hope so: he has considerable potential, and so does his temporary office help Robin Ellacott, who will become a permanent fixture I hope.